Víctor M. Torres-Vélez
Assistant Professor, Humanties, LAC Unit
Title: Toxic Assemblages: Necroecologies of Race and Accumulation in Louisiana
Abstract: This article seeks to understand why the pollution of the Mississippi River industrial corridor unequally and disproportionally affects African-American communities the most, with terrible chronic illnesses and death. We argue that to begin untangling such complex and dense toxic assemblages, racialization needs to be a central analytical category. We offer necroecologies, as a new theoretical framework, that understands death is neither accidental nor collateral to production. Instead, it is factored in the profit maximisation calculus.
Link to Excerpt
Nicole Beth Wallenbrock
Assistant Professor, Humanities, Modern Languages
Title: The Khama of “Papicha” (Mounia Meddour, 2019)
Abstract: Women’s hands are visually dominant throughout the Algerian-French co-production Papicha (2019). As both creative and protective agents, the hands evoke the North African symbol khamsa (also referred to in Muslim cultures as “the hand of Fatima” and in Jewish cultures as “the hand of Mariem”), a woman’s hand with elaborate henna designs, which often includes the evil eye it wards against at its center. The tight framing of women’s hands narratively reflects the protagonist’s sewing abilities, at others, women’s hands touching one another embody an emotional connection. The framing also reveals Papicha’s streaming production schema.
Emmanuel A. Velayos Larrabure
Assistant Professor, Humanities, LAC Unit
Title: Geological Tales and Palimpsests in the War of Canudos
Abstract: This project studies the relationship between geological and textual metaphors in key texts surrounding the War of Canudos (1897), where the army of the newly established Republic of Brazil decimated a subaltern and pro-monarchist uprising in the country’s backlands. I focus on the work of the Brazilian intellectual Euclides da Cunha (1866–1909), a polymath who depicted the war through a wide array of scientific and aesthetic discourses. His fin-de-siècle chronicles and book, Os sertões (1902), are permeated with a geological rhetoric that renders war landscapes and their revolutionary inhabitants as products of the dynamic overlap of strata from different ages of the Earth’s deep history. […]
Thomas Beachdel
Associate Professor, Humanities
Title: It Was Once My Universe Book Project
Abstract: It Was Once My Universe is scholarly art history monograph (book) that builds on Beachdel’s curatorial-based research, which resulted in five international art exhibitions: Tokyo, Japan (2019), Prague Czech Republic (2020), Berlin, Germany (2020), Arles, France (2021), and Xiamen, China (2021/22). It Was Once My Universe is about immigration, displacement, and identity. It traces and positions the artist Marie Tomanova’s first return home to her small family farm in a border town in the Czech Republic after eight difficult years of living as an undocumented immigrant in New York City, much of which occurred during the harrowing period of the Trump presidency.
Link to Book Project Proposal
Elizabeth Porter
Assistant Professor, English
Title: Plotting Women and London Mobility in Eighteenth-Century Narratives
Abstract: My project examines urban mobility, narrative form, and the depiction of women in literary representations of eighteenth-century London. The population of the metropolis nearly doubled throughout the eighteenth century, and it became routine for women from a variety of backgrounds to interact with one another in urban spaces. I examine how the eighteenth-century London setting in novels and nonfictional forms (e.g. letters and diaries) enables unconventional narrative possibilities while highlighting the asymetrical relationships among women based on class and race.
Asrat G. Amnie
Assistant Professor, Education
Title: Embedding Career Readiness to the Curriculum: Empowering Minority College Graduates to Succeed Beyond College
Abstract: Hostos Community College stands on a foundation of a robust strategic plan designed to ensure academic and career success and upward mobility for a diverse population of students. The College continues to provide faculty with an opportunity and support to innovate, develop, and execute ideas that would enhance student success. This project seeks to integrate career-readiness core competencies into the teaching-learning process. Executed in collaboration with the Office of Career Services, the project will address the research hypothesis that course-integrated career-readiness education is more likely to result in better graduation rates and career success of students after graduation.
Link to Poster
Debasish Roy
Professor, Natural Science & Physical Science Unit
Title: Development of Biomedical Workforce Through Breast Cancer Research
Abstract: Breast cancer is a genetically and clinically heterogeneous disease, and the second most frequent cause of cancer death among American women. During disease progression, patterns of gene expression in cell lines and tissues are influenced either by exposure to chemical carcinogens from the polluted environment or by ionizing radiation. At present, relation between environmental carcinogens and progress of the disease is not yet clearly established. Therefore, this pilot project is initially focusing to address the problem of growing breast cancer cases in the South Bronx area in recent years mainly among the underserved communities and lack of organized databases make the situation even worse. […]
Yoel Rodríguez
Professor, Natural Sciences
– Article Title: Engineering Student Perceptions of Combined Faculty and Peer Academic Performance (Authors: Rodíguez, Y. Varelas, Antonios, Angulo, Nieves, & Nieto-Wire, Clara) Link to audio presentation of paper; Link to Paper.
– Poster Title: In Silico Discovery of SARS-CoV-2 Papain-Like Protease Inhibitors (By Ronald Renold Salnave and Mustafa Ahmed) Poster 1: SARS.. PLPro…
– Poster Title: In Silico Discovery of Neutralizing Agents Targeting SARS-CoV-2 Spike Glycoprotein (By Scarlet Martínez Cardoze and Onyinyechi Winner Obineche) Link to Poster 2
– Poster Title: Computational Discovery of SARS-CoV-2 Main Protease Inhibitors (By Dawrys Muñoz and Kevin Rivadeneira) Link to Poster 3
Vyacheslav Dushenkov
Professor, Natural Science
Co-authors: Csanad Gurdon and Shukhratdzhon Satorov
Title: DNA barcoding of the high-altitude Artemisia and Nepeta species
Abstract: DNA barcoding was performed for four medicinal plant species from the mountain region of Tajikistan. The nucleotide sequences for Artemisia sieberi, Artemisia scoparia, Artemisia vulgaris, and Nepeta glutinosa were deposited into the GenBank at the National Center for Biotechnology Information.